Introduction to Application Deployment

Deploying an application always seems like it's such a simple process to an end user. All the end user needs to do is double-click Setup.exe and the program he's trying to install works like magic and installs the files needed for the application. As a developer, you know that creating deployment projects with the tools provided by Microsoft has been a nightmare.

Using Visual Basic 6 Setup and Deployment Wizard to deploy forms-based applications was a frightening thought. When an installation was complete on a target machine, you had to cross your fingers, and pray that when the machine rebooted there would be no blue screen of death, and that some core operating system file would not be accidentally overwritten by your installation package. This opened up the market for third-party deployment applications, for which most companies simply give in and pay big dollars.

With the advent of Visual Studio .NET, there are no longer issues with deploying applications using the tools provided by Microsoft.

It's easy to understand why deploying applications was so difficult before .NET. All components and applications on a machine needed to be registered in the Windows Registry. Any time the Registry is involved, there are going to be complications. With .NET, the Registry goes away. There's no need to register an application or component to make it work. The .NET Framework provides the runtime that all .NET applications need to run. So, if the .NET Framework is installed on the machine, your application runs without needing any extra handling.

This is a huge feature of .NET. The fact that you can literally copy a folder that contains an application from machine A to machine B, and just be able to run, saves a lot of configuration and deployment headaches.

In addition to the core technology in .NET making the deployment of applications a snap, the actual installation technology has improved as the operating systems have improved. The Windows Installer technology is responsible for handling installation services in Windows.